The day after the House of Representatives impeached President Donald J. Trump, seven Democratic presidential candidates took the stage in the last debate of the year, sponsored by Politico and PBS NewsHour. While the debates surrounding who “won” and who “lost” are sure to continue for at least the next week, Joe Biden won.
Above all else, the single most important divide on the debate stage—and within the Democratic Party itself—is whether Trump is the disease or but a symptom of something much more troubling. Whereas candidates like Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden continue to argue that Trump is a disease that requires a simple overcoming, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer argue that Trump is the inevitable product of decades of particular social and economic development in the nation, instead targeting the “root” of the problem. With only 44 days to go until the Iowa caucuses and the stakes resultantly growing higher, it’s important to note that Biden has been ahead in national polls throughout the course of the year, meaning one thing: this is his race to lose.
Critics gleefully point to Biden’s major gaffes during the course of the debate, the first of which was when he interrupted Pakistani-American journalist and moderator Amna Nawaz to question her pronunciation of “Afghanistan”, a word she pronounced correctly in spite of his insistence on utilizing the Americanized pronunciation that has become the standard stateside. In another ill-fated moment, Biden—responding to the moderator’s questions about the possibility of reparations for the descendants of slaves—began to ramble about immigration, something that had little to do with the topic at hand. In his final gaffe of the night, Biden imitated a child with a stutter—and while it is worth noting that Biden himself grew up with a speech impediment, the course of action was nevertheless a bit… insensitive. Beyond his obvious shortcomings during the debate, critics noted that Biden was generally bland in comparison to his colleagues of the Democratic “triumvirate,” droning on about his doubts about how Sanders’ and Warren’s ambitious healthcare plans would be paid for.
Regardless of these slight fumbles, the truth is, Biden came across as steady, informed, and appropriately aggressive. With debates generally doing little to swing the tides, this one was no different. As before, Biden remains ahead, with Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg vying for second. As they did at the beginning of the year, Democratic voters seem to generally remain unsure of which side of the party they fall on—the “old” Democratic Party of Biden or the “new” of Warren and Sanders—and the fractured polls reflect this. No candidate has managed to surge to the top, and as long as this voter base remains divided, the status quo, the Democratic establishment, that is Joe Biden will waltz towards a rather unchallenged nomination.
